> Any vector icons also need to be rasterized before drawing to the screen which can take up memory and make things less speedy.
Well...any raster format needs to be read from disk, decoded and drawn, though there are special optimizations for the drawing step.
Vector icons were the new hot well before the original iPhone was released. Here's an article about OSX 10.4 Tiger released in 2004, 3 years before the first iPhone[1].
[1] http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/45544/mac-os-x-tiger-to-sup...